“Is NATO Relevant?” Sarwar Kashmeri with UK MP Mike Gapes, on Skynews

What’s Next For NATO: A “Reboot or Delete?” Robin Young, host of Here & Now asks Sarwar Kashmeri

Sarwar Kashmeri & NATO 2.0 on Fox News

To preserve NATO bridge it to the EU

NATO used to be the world’s most formidable military alliance. But, its original reason for existence, the Soviet Union, disintegrated years ago, and its dreams of being a world cop are withering in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the European Union’s Common Security & Defense Policy (CSDP) has deployed twenty-seven successful military/civil missions from Africa to Asia in the last ten years. Through CSDP, Europeans are increasingly taking charge of managing their own foreign and security policy. NATO is no longer the sole and preeminent Euro-Atlantic security actor.

But watching NATO fade into irrelevance would be a mistake. It is a tried and true platform to harness the resources of North America and Europe. NATO’s future usefulness depends on its willingness to accept its reduced role, to let the EU handle the day-to-day security needs of Europe, and to craft a relationship with CSDP that will allow North America and Europe to act militarily together, should that ever become necessary.

It is time for NATO 2.0, a new version of NATO, to fit the realities of an ever more integrated Europe in the twenty-first century.

America should say to Europe that they will cease to underwrite the security of Europe and its periphery in just three to four years, after which America will only serve as a catastrophic security layer

This was central message I tabled for debate at a private dinner hosted by the Bertelsmann Stiftung in the center of Brussels during the events surrounding European release of “NATO 2.0: Release or Delete?” June 14-18, 2011.

The shock of this proposal would galvanize EU leadership, I said, to tackle reforms to the EU’s defense establishment that presently spends $300 billion (equal to America’s defense budget prior to 9/11) but is rife with duplicate weapons systems and other inefficiencies.

The 20 people around the table included one of the four Directors General of NATO, the former special advisor to Baroness Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign & Security Policy, and a series of European defence experts, politicians, commentators and academics specialising in security matters.

The lively views expressed included:

The shock will come from the US within three years but the shock will come before that from young Germans.

Is Germany going to put up with France and the UK driving foreign defence policy?

Germanyunderstands that there needs to be a common European army and is prepared to contribute, but GB and France stand in the way of EU strategic thinking.

The besieged Libyan city of Misrata has become a killing field. Civilians by the hundreds are being killed in this densely populated city of 550,000 by Qaddafi forces. NATO’s aircraft are ineffective in this urban environment.

There is only one solution to Misrata’s plight: the immediate deployment of a military force to break the siege. Fortunately such a force is now ready to be inserted in Libya, it is the European Union’s recently approved EUFOR Libya, a battalion size (1100) force of European troops ready to deploy in Libya as soon as the United Nation requests it.

A force on the ground in Misrata would consolidate these fragile rebel gains, secure the port, open up a lifeline for supplies to come in and civilians to depart and so ensure that this Eastern-most advance of the Qaddafi forces is not repeated again. An organized military presence would also add intelligence on the ground to make NATO warplanes more effective going forward.

It is time the U.S.urged the UN to make this 911 call to put European boots on the ground in Libya.

The decision provides that the EU will, if requested by the UN, conduct a military operation in the framework of the EU’s Common security and defence policy (CSDP) in order to support humanitarian assistance in the region. It is important to note this is the 28th CSDP mission. Other missions include NAVFOR Somalia, the EU’s anti-piracy flotilla that is twice the size of NATO’s, and EUFOR Chad/CAR under which the EU deployed 3,700 troops to the center ofAfrica to assist the UN.

U.S. Vice President Biden correctly said the EU has the means, all it lacks is the political will to handle Libya. Here’s a chance for the U.S.to inject the will into the EU. Get EUFOR Libya into action.

Even before the onset of hostilities in Libya it was obvious to insiders on both sides of the Atlantic that NATO was increasingly dysfunctional. Libya has now shown the wider public that the emperor has no clothes.

Cohesion used to be NATO’s trademark, but there is little of that left. And the reputation of the ‘greatest military alliance’ is a diminishing commodity for younger American military officers as I recently found out during a visit to a United Sates Navy aircraft carrier. During dinner I was seated between the ship’s two senior officers. The older Executive Officer felt NATO was the cornerstone of Western defence, while the younger commander of the ship’s attack squadrons told me it still had to be proven to him that NATO was still useful. <read full op ed on European Geostrategy>

…Technically, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operates only in the wake of an attack on a NATO member. The war in Afghanistan followed such an attack and was, in the beginning, widely perceived as a war against a common enemy. Libya is different: There was no attack, there is no common enemy, and now there is no consensus…

MY TAKE: Not only is there little consensus within NATO on what it is doing in Libya, the economic recession has bottled up the alliance’s effectiveness. It is not well known that each NATO member pays for its military operation in NATO missions. The Alliance itself has no funds or military assets to fight wars. In Libya, the UK and France (and whatever other countries have agreed to contribute to the war plan, and only a handful of NATO members have) pay for their military contribution out of their national treasury. As they have been doing in Afghanistan for a decade now. Not long ago the Prime Minister of Poland showed up at NATO headquarters to bemoan the country’s expenses in Afghanistan that total $1bn per year, fully one-tenth of Poland’s entire defense budget.

The United States spent upwards of $600 million in the first week of the Libyan war, now it expects to spend around $40 million over three weeks, at most. So who picks up the slack? Mainly France and Britain. No wonder the two would like other NATO members to step up to the plate.

Here’s an idea. NATO is busy building itself a new billion plus dollar headquarters outside Brussels. Maybe it could shelve the plan, donate the money to all those countries that can’t afford to join in NATO’s war in Libya and help poor France and Britain from going broke fighting…and save the poor American taxpayers from ultimately footing another war bill.

A once-great alliance, NATO has long since lost its bearings. For anyone concerned with getting things back on track, Sarwar Kashmeri provides a detailed and eminently sensible road map

— Andrew J. Bacevich, professor of history and international relations, Boston University, and author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (2010)

This brilliant analysis leaves no doubt that diminished resources, sheer neglect, and strategic differences among NATO’s partners have weakened this long-standing pillar of Western defense. Sarwar Kashmeri urges the United States and the European Union to align their thinking and combine their resources to ensure that the ‘world’s most successful military alliance’ will live on

—James F. Hoge, Jr., counselor, Council on Foreign Relations

This book provides extraordinary insights into NATO and the future of the transatlantic alliance. Every person concerned with the future of this vital alliance has much to learn from Sarwar Kashmeri’s highly readable and compelling analysis

—Noel V. Lateef, president and CEO, Foreign Policy Association

Sarwar Kashmeri’s views on the Atlantic alliance are widely respected, and NATO 2.0 demonstrates why. It is a meticulously researched, wise, and lucid book that is enriched by Kashmeri’s wide-ranging interviews with American and European leaders (past and present) and foreign policy experts. Kashmeri does not pull punches in discussing the serious problems NATO faces in developing a compelling raison d’être in the 21st century, but he also points the way forward by offering creative proposals for cooperation between the alliance and the European Union through the latter’s European Security and Defense Policy. Those who believe that NATO still has a purpose would do well to read his impressive book

—Rajan Menon, Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in Political Science, City College of New York/City University of New York and author of The End of Alliances (2007)